According to Jake’s Circology teacher, not even the importance factor was random. The permanent and immovable prognosis of your relevance to others was also down to the individual. You’d made the choices for yourself, even if you weren’t completely aware of it. The selection was reached by studying your deepest fears, personality type, intelligence, creativity, ambition and achievements since birth. All easily accessed by the Circuit by mining your Memory Cloud. To ensure balance, your profile would be benchmarked against the vast wealth of data generated by others. The system had been designed on the basis of fairness and equality, but there had to be limits. Not everyone could be vital and not everyone should be superfluous. Everyone had to compete for their place. The final decision was based on a robust formula from the billions who’d gone before you.
The Memory Cloud made a decision that you would be too selfish to make. A choice that combined your potential and the necessity of the West.
Since building the Memory Cloud, the Circuit had been responsible for collecting, analysing and deciphering every memory since subscribers were born. They knew more about people’s lives than they did. They knew what was good for each individual, and everyone else who’d subscribed to their world. The Memory Cloud was a masterpiece, a brilliant piece of innovation created by an influential global software conglomerate to solve one of modern life’s biggest problems.
Capacity.
Since the turn of the millennium humans had exceeded their natural age limits and their brains had been exposed to an ever-increasing volume of data. Yet physical capacity for data evolved slower than their desire to consume it. The Memory Cloud solved the problem. Rather than wait for physiological development to catch up, technology enabled subscribers to upload their thoughts, knowledge, memories and emotions to a secure cloud-based application free of charge. In turn, humans liberated large portions of their brainpower, safe in the knowledge that if they needed to retrieve the past a backup file could be accessed at any time and in any place. Memories were never forgotten, and knowledge would never be lost because they would always be there. Long after your body failed you.
But the Memory Cloud was more than a storage facility.
The Circuit presided over a priceless database of human opinion that it quickly used to reshape the world. If you held the collective thoughts of seven billion people, then you understood exactly what they wanted. In turn, if you knew their innermost frailties and fears you could use it to help them achieve their goals by making their decisions for them. Thinking on behalf of subscribers was one of the additional benefits of membership. A function that began as an optional extra gradually, and almost unnoticeably, became mandatory.
Procrastination is a very human instinct. Rarely do people have a clear picture of what path to take, influenced as we are by the media, our peers and our own assessment of logical information and illogical feelings. Often emotions and facts clash, confusing us to make a biased decision that actually damages our physical, mental, financial or emotional well-being. That’s where the Circuit steps in. It modelled the various options from the data available and made a decision that was in your best interest. The choice would be validated against millions of other people who’d been in a similar situation. After the event the outcome would be thoroughly analysed for its relative success and the data submitted to the control group to constantly improve the accuracy of the system.
Its impact swept through every aspect of society like wildfire spreads through dry grass. In the early days, even the political elites contracted the Circuit to help them. Here was a tool that could identify policy decisions that appealed to a majority of voters. It didn’t take long before the Circuit was more instrumental in people’s lives than the politicians themselves. By the twenty-forties governments were no more than proxy management teams for a new global power and voting became just another decision that was taken on people’s behalf. If the masses desired change then there was no dispute. The Circuit’s influence was unavoidable, and in time uploading to the Memory Cloud became law. The punishment for non-subscribers or rule-breakers was severe. But even then, the brave new world didn’t appeal to everyone and when freedoms are suppressed there will always be outliers.
A minority refused to comply with authorities. There was no single reason for their defiance. Across a spectrum of motives that unified their position, some disagreed ethically, frightened that their data would be misused. Some refused, or were physically unable, to wear the technology that enabled access to the cloud. Some simply had no desire to utilise the benefits of membership. These non-conformers were colloquially referred to as speccies and most were forced into hiding to remain unmarked and untracked. But it didn’t end there. Pursuing a policy of universal coverage, the Circuit recruited teams called ‘Archivists’ to patrol, locate and convert them, although not even their vast knowledge knew how many speccies existed in the world.
None of them would ever receive a letter.
For everyone else approaching their eighteenth birthday its arrival meant two things.
Firstly, you no longer had control over your future aspirations. Your only hope rested on the Circuit making a fair assessment of your own desires and accurately choosing a life you wanted. For the vast majority of people this turned out to be the case. An analysis of satisfaction on the subject, measured through the memories stored in the cloud and having a one hundred percent response rate, gave an average score of six-point-nine-nine ‘light bulbs’ out of seven. No one seemed overly concerned with the zero-point-zero-one who were less than satisfied. That’s the problem with statistics. People focus on the majority and ignore the minority. Every year millions of letters were sent out and the statistically small fraction of people given lives they hated equated to tens of thousands. Not quite so insignificant.
It didn’t bother the Circuit. The figures were used to prove the system worked and to subdue potential disquiet. Every day a stream of propaganda was drip-fed into memory feeds and delivered to people’s subconscious whilst they slept. Sleep was prime time in the cloud. Advertisers paid aggressive sums to promote products at a time when the masses weren’t able to switch them off. A five-second night slot to a defined target group sold for tens of millions of credits.
The second realisation that accompanied the arrival of your letter was the knowledge that departure for your new life, if you were male, happened one day later.
Ascension Day.
But you wouldn’t be leaving alone.
Every eighteen-year-old was gifted two guides.
They weren’t just responsible for escorting you to your new life, which might just be thousands of miles away, they became temporary caseworkers keeping a virtual eye on you while you integrated into your new lifestyle and surroundings. For most users they were helpful, a value-added feature of membership. For a minority they felt like a sinister extension to the constant surveillance over their lives. It was one final surprise on Ascension Eve.
Jake Montana was about to find out what it was like. His letter was due this morning. Its arrival would be disappointing even if it wasn’t a surprise. He’d been receiving regular alerts through his cranial implant for a month. Each internal ‘ping’ sent a shiver through his body like the harbinger of doom.
Jake loved life how it was. He liked living with his parents, Kyle and Deborah Montana. He liked his younger sister, Tyra, at least when she wasn’t goading him about his impending misery. He liked his sleepy little New Hampshire town nestled on the coast and near his beach. He liked his local hovercraft softball team, the ‘Dream Centre’ down the road where you could plug yourself into the very latest in virtual technology, and all the natural delights of the American East Coast.